I have suffered from a very mild form of
Agoraphobia for a couple of years, which is in essence the fear of
embarrassing yourself in public.
My particular fear is of passing out in public or having a bad panic attack to the point of passing out in public. Agoraphobia is
particularly annoying because you actual get anxious about getting anxious, and you tend to build up the anxiety levels as you worry about a specific public event in the future.
For me personally there are a couple of
situations which make my anxious, meetings, sometimes sitting in restaurants, queues, walking across open roads at traffic lights, talking to people while standing up and driving.
About the only thing I do avoid these days is driving, mainly because the consequences of having a serious panic attack while driving could be catastrophic and or I could kill myself or someone else.
For people who do not suffer from anxiety or panic attacks it can seem almost incomprehensible how 'a bit of stress' can have such an affect on someone else.
I am a bit of insomniac and
regularly take
Stilnox (
Ambien) to help me sleep which does a great job, or so I thought. Of late there has been a huge amount of press abut
Stilnox in Australia,
particularly to do with side effects such as amnesia when taking it, sleep walking and in one case it has been linked to someone walking off a
balcony and killing themselves.
I was reading an article about this and found out that the most common two side effects from regular (or even semi regular) use are:
DizzinessAnxiety
So hold on, the two most common side effects are what I would describe as a "heightened sense of anxiety".
In thinking back I can pin point too times at which for days I have been seriously anxious and they have almost all
coincided with a period where I have taken
Stilnox for several (at least five) nights in a row.
So It's a no
brainer really I can't take it any more to help me sleep, so here is to finding
another to stay asleep that doesn't involve
something that makes me anxious!
